Visitors to modern museum exhibitions see only a limited
number of objects selected from the collections. With only limited label
copy available, it can be difficult for the visitor to understand the
object in the context of the scientific, artistic or cultural theory
presented in the exhibition. What happens when the visitor wants to
know more? How can museums offer the original documents of discovery,
the raw material of research, to the museum visitor and the World Wide
Web user? Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, the School of Computer
Science at Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History are collaborating to develop the prototype of a Smart Web Exhibit
(SWE) designed to deliver information online, on target and on time,
to a diverse user community. Visitors will view digitized archival material
drawn from signature collections at both institutions. Users of the
SWE will select material based on their level of interest (basic curiosity,
generally informed interest, or detailed technical interest) or the
amount of time they want to spend. Both onsite and online users will
have the option of viewing a choice of pre-selected online exhibits
of this material or searching the online collections by the materials'
type, keyword or subject terms. The University Librariesí SWE will provide
access to photographs, correspondence, lecture notes and published and
unpublished papers of two early innovators in computer science, Herbert
Simon and Alan Newell. The Carnegie Museum's SWE will display unpublished
field notes, correspondence, photographs, published popular and scientific
articles dealing with the Museum's early paleontological discoveries,
especially that of Diplodocus carnegii. Challenges and compromises
of the initial stages of this collaborative project are discussed.

On Beyond Label Copy

Non nova sed nove: Not
new things but in a new way

Introduction

Visitors to modern museum exhibitions see only a
limited number of objects selected from the museum's collections. Since
the late nineteenth century, when the concept of the "index" museum was
proposed by J. E. Gray of the British Museum (Natural History) and promoted
by W.H. Flower of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons,
many public museum collections have been divided into those items selected
for exhibition and a much larger research collection that is not usually
available to the public (Stearn, 1981). In an index museum, selected typical
specimens summarize the whole of a collection in a relatively small space,
as it was felt that the museum's large collections organized for scientific
study, with their masses of unique, but related objects, would bewilder
and tire the public. Museum visitors, unaware of the existence of these
separate research collections, may assume that the entire holdings of
the Museum are on permanent display. Collections of archival material,
including correspondence, photographs and other records dealing with the
acquisition and use of the museum's objects, are less known than the research
collections themselves, as the visiting public seldom sees any archival
material on display. Moreover, unless the formation and development of
the museum's collection is the subject of the exhibition, there is little
information in most exhibition label copy to indicate when and under what
circumstances a particular item was added to the collection or the context
from which it was taken. This research explores the idea that the box
office appeal of seeing the "real stuff" in museums could be
strengthened by access to the collection records and the related documentation
that supports the evidence for that reality.

Proponents of the New Museology, as summarized by
Stam (1993), emphasize the value of the museumís information base and
suggest that the wider availability of information about the acquisition
of collections is a way of fulfilling the social responsibility of museums.
Those who see the museum visit as an interactive educational encounter
such as Falk (1992) and Hooper-Greenhill (1994) emphasize the need to
present contextual information about the cultural materials exhibited
in museums as this context provides a basis for the visitor to make a
connection with the content and concepts of the exhibition. Hooper-Greenhill
(1994) speaks of the development of museum education programs, from the
early part of the twentieth century when "curators struggled to establish
museums as places where important objects were collected and cared for"
to the end of the 20th century, when new ways of communication
were developed using "discovery galleries, interactive exhibits and new
relationships to new audiences." The display of and possible interaction
with "real objects" has considerable power when viewed in the social situation
of a museum visit. Museum visitors want to see some reflection of themselves
in an exhibit. While not all museum visitors will have gone on a field
expedition, many can relate to the theme of exploration. With the proposed
Smart Web Exhibits (SWE), museum visitors will be able to view both the
mounted specimen in the museum gallery and the correspondence and field
photographs related to that specimen, sharing in the tedium of fruitless
exploration and the excitement of actual discovery.

The development of the Smart Web Exhibits will explore
a portion of the larger research question that asks what criteria museum
visitors apply in choosing one exhibit over another. Experimental variables
that the project hopes to isolate and test through the end user interface
will include the level of interest as indicated by the visitor and the
amount of time the visitor wants to spend looking at the exhibit.

Responding to the expectation that museums will
provide access to information about their collections via their websites,
this project plans to provide information through web-based kiosks on-site
in the museum's exhibition galleries and on the museum's and the library's
websites. The University Librariesí SWE will provide access to photographs,
correspondence, lecture notes and published and unpublished papers of
two early innovators in computer science, Herbert Simon and Alan Newell.
Web access to the congressional papers of U.S. Senator John Heinz is already
available on Carnegie Mellon
University's site and will serve as a model for the Simon and Newell
papers. The Carnegie Museum's SWE will display unpublished field notes,
correspondence, photographs, published popular and scientific articles
dealing with the Museum's early paleontological discoveries, especially
that of Diplodocus carnegii. Evaluation techniques will be designed
to explore the differences in the visitorís queries and other uses of
the information system depending on whether they are onsite in the galleries
or searching the collection information via the website.

While the popularity of behind-the-scenes tours
of the museum's research collections suggests that visitors are interested
in seeing more of a museumís collections, the specific research questions
asked in this project include

Do museum visitors want to know more about exhibited
objects?

How can this additional information be organized
and presented for the visitor's use?

What type of background and contextual information
would visitors select, such as correspondence or photographs, if given
a choice?

How can archival documents be organized for presentation
as an adjunct and online exhibition?

How does online use of these adjunct archival
materials differ from their onsite use, particularly in frequency of
selection?

Do online visitors spend more time searching
for and viewing this associated archival material than onsite visitors?

What amenities, such as a separate seating area
or a separate, sound-insulated space within the galleries, would increase
use of this material onsite?

With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library
Services, Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, the Carnegie Museum of
Natural History and the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon
are collaborating to develop, document and disseminate prototypes of Smart
Web Exhibits. Smart Web Exhibits (SWE) are designed to deliver information
online, on target and on time to a diverse user community. The typical
museum exhibition is a distillation of information gathered from many
sources, including the correspondence of collectors, the records of acquisition,
the dry bones of scientific description and subsequent publication - all
part of the raw material from which the curatorial narrative of exhibitions
are derived. Using the SWE, museum visitors will have direct access to
this material. Like the user selecting material from the library catalog,
the museum visitor may select material from the SWE to supplement the
museum's exhibits. Visitors may either follow the suggested trails of
an online exhibition or strike off on new ones of their own choosing by
searching the document base on the basis of keyword, an individual's name
or some other specific term.

Telling the Story

Vannevar Bush (1945) wrote that "a record, if it
is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be
stored and above all it must be consulted." Museum exhibitions are a form
of record and represent the choice of curators, educators and exhibition
designers to present the curatorial narrative. With the Smart Web Exhibit,
we are combining the traditional selection of quality materials with access
to the raw materials of scholarship, including unpublished manuscript
sources that have been inaccessible and seldom included in exhibitions,
except by reference. In the SWE's display, transcriptions of handwritten
letters will accompany the page images, creating a self-documenting exhibition
label. By including easily accessible original documents in the information
base organized by the SWE, we are diversifying the voice of the exhibition.
The Smart Web Exhibit goes on beyond the label copy by including the writings
of those directly involved in discovering the objects displayed.

The SWE extends the museum exhibition, allowing
the visitor to see the full text of the selected article or manuscript
letter or the field photograph or video, not just the index terms in the
catalog and the bibliographic entry for the retrieved text. The desirability
of this immediacy of access is favorably noted by Gurian (1991).

We understand that not everyone wants the same additional information,
but the individual who does want more information wants it then and
there. Immediate access to information is satisfying to the audience;
therefore the task is to provide information in the exhibition in a
manner such that the audience knows it is available without being intrusive.

To tell the story of early paleontological discoveries
at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, we are creating a curatorial
narrative by using the actual documents which recorded those discoveries.
The inclusion of the extensive correspondence between the museum's administrators,
scientists and field collectors, the required field expense reports and
the photographs capture the museum's side of the story. Clippings from
local newspapers and early scientific articles interpreting the discoveries
add the popular and scientific dimensions. The complete text and illustrations
of the first scientific publication describing the Carnegie's signature
dinosaur, Diplodocus carnegii, is already available online and
can now be put in context along with the correspondence between the Museum's
director and the field collectors. This work was scanned as part of the
celebration of the 100th anniversary of its discovery and is
available at the Antique Books site (http://www.antiquebooks.net/library.html)
For background on the Antique Books project, see Thibadeau and Benoit
(1997). The online scrapbook approach has been tested on the Museum's
website, with the slideshow "This is your life, Diplodocus Carnegii"
(http://www.clpgh.org/cmnh/exhibits/dippy/index.html).
Picture books of field photographs, recording actual field activities
of the Museum's recent collecting seasons, are a popular feature of the
Museum's simulated dinosaur dig, the Bonehunters's Quarry (http://www.clpgh.org/cmnh/bonehunters/index.html).
These albums continue the tradition of documenting the discoveries and
field preparation of fossils, as well as the perils and pleasures of modern
camp life.

In designing a museum exhibition, the earliest,
and the most influential decisions involve the choice of audience for
whom the exhibition is intended and the point of view or bias used in
selecting and connecting the items used. Lavine (1991) questions the ability
of an exhibition to maintain a single voice, given the evolution of scholarship
within a discipline and the resultant divergence of voices and views.
He suggests that different types of exhibitions have different modes of
presentation and organization, noting that "exhibitions of social history
are driven by interpretive ideas and are usually organized as narratives.
As a result, objects are not made the primary focus of exhibits but retain
significance as corroborative evidence." Providing the museum visitor
with a choice of layers of information "of successively greater depth
and detail" is one technique used by museums in providing diversity of
information about the objects and ideas presented in their exhibitions.
MacDonald (1991) notes that "Diversity is the key to a museum fulfilling
its role as an information provider in the service of society." The Smart
Web Exhibits may be one technique for providing those alternate voices.

Labels - What Do Visitors Want To Know?

Museum exhibition labels are the most evident types
of the passive information sources provided to museum visitors. George
Browne Goode (1895), writing on museum administration from the vantage
point of assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, recognized
the positive value of labels, noting "an efficient educational museum
may be described as a collection of instructive labels, each illustrated
by a well-selected specimen."

Like many other aspects of museum exhibition technique,
fashions on the length of labels have changed. Serrell (1996), whose writings
on the nature and extent of the museum exhibition label are widely referred
to, is quite firm on the length of the label, noting that "all types
of labels should be kept as brief as possible." She does recognize
that there are other types of interpretation, which can be used to inform
and engage the visitors, ranging from handouts to extensive exhibition
catalogs. "Videos, audio tours, computer databases and demonstrations
by staff can provide other means and modes of presenting information and
interpretation. All of these supplementary forms of interpretation will
allow interpretive labels on walls or in cases to remain brief, as they
should be." Gurian (1991) also mentions the "branching programs"
of interactive videodiscs as a means of bringing additional information
to the user without cluttering up the walls of the exhibition.

In selecting material for exhibition, as well as
the label information accompanying them, curators and designers are guided
by Serrel's warning (1996) "The museumís mandate to present information
must be tempered by a responsiveness to what visitors are interested in
and capable of receiving and processing."

Organizational Stratagies

The focus of the early phase of the Smart Web Exhibit
project will be to develop techniques for matching the visitor to the
material available. This may be done by beginning with the documents and
identifying individual documents as being of interest to a visitor with
a particular level of interest. Another technique would be to begin with
the visitor, as in the typical library catalog search, allowing the visitor-as-user
to search documents for keywords of interest to them.

One technique of categorizing the visitor's level
of interest would be to include this information in the coding of the
documents. One possible approach to the conditional interpretation of
documents would be to organize them in hierarchical type trees as is normal
with collections. Documents would be labeled as described in Thibadeau
(1996) and the labels then formatted in XML format and manipulated using
advanced XML scripting as described in Thibadeau, Balderas, Snyder, and
Nestor (1999). Similar systems have been built for books at the National
Academy Press (http://www.nap.edu) and
World Resources Institute (http://www.wri.org),
for wide-ranging materials including videos (http://www.ulib.org),
and for art, art history, and architecture images at the Academic Image
Cooperative (http://www.academicimage.org).

Another method for matching the material and the
visitor would be to apply a technique under development at Carnegie Mellon
University Libraries. The Automated Reference Assistant (ARA) provides
basic reference assistance to remote users by suggesting subject-specific
reference tools based not only on the subject of the user's question,
but also on the level of information desired. In the proposed model, resources
are categorized as basic and advanced. If a user retrieves too many resources,
only the ones identified by the system as basic are presented. The user
may then request additional information, at which point the system provides
the full list, including both basic and advanced resources.

One technique will follow the library search model,
using the organizational strategy developed for the HELIOS project (http://heinz1.library.cmu.edu/HELIOS).
In this model, individual documents organized by traditional archival
finding guides are scanned, the digitized images are converted to searchable
text using Optical Character Recognition and the quality of the resultant
page images and corresponding texts verified. Information on the archival
organization of the documents is preserved and metadata is attached as
part of the scanning and verification process. User will be able to search
the material by noun phrases in the text or subject terms and limit the
search by document type or date. A list of proposed document types for
the Museum's collection is included in the appendix to this paper.

One of the features of the HELIOS project used to
organize archival collections is its notion of "bundles." This is their
term for identifying groups of different formats of material fastened
together. Bundles are a technique which can be used to record the physical
relatedness of documents. By this definition, there are "bundles" in the
archival material supplied by the Carnegie Museum. In addition to maps
and other field sketches inserted in the body of letters and field reports,
there are attached photographs and the all-important field expense reports
and receipts from workmen. In the manner of television documentaries,
the text of the letters could be interrupted, and interpreted, by photographs
which illustrate the action described in the letter.

The strategy that follows the exhibition organizational
model is one in which the documents are grouped into thematic hierarchies.
Access to the content of the archival documents available via the Smart
Web Exhibit can be provided based on the userís expressed level of interest
similar to the selection made for a traditional on-the-walls exhibition
or in a less-structured way similar to that of users browsing a library
catalog. In the first mode, the archivist or curator designs a hierarchical
structure that categorizes documents into these exhibition schemes. In
the second, the users search for documents that match the search keys
that they have input.

In the case of the material dealing with the Carnegie
paleontological discoveries, one proposed structure dealing with the nature
of research in the field of paleontology is outlined below. Individual
documents will be slotted into these categories as well as being flagged
for the user's level of interest.

Figure 1: Thematic organization of
archival material

In all cases, one of the measures of the success of the
organizational and indexing strategies used in this project will be the
ability to read a collection of letters dealing with a particular field
discovery. The challenge will be to present these materials in chronological
order, regardless of how the actual documents may have been scattered
across different archival series or record groups. Here will be an opportunity
for the museum visitor to share in the excitement of discovery.

Identifying The User

Without abandoning the added value of the curatorial
narrative, the SWE is designed to adapt to the user's expressed level
of interest. Serrell (1996) reports that the Denver Museum of Natural
History used discovery, exploration and study as the three levels of information
supplied to their visitors. The SWE proposes the following as its initial
categories of these levels of interest.

It may be important to categorize users according
to the amount of time they have available to "view" the exhibit. The amount
of available time could be matched with the levels of interest by offering
a "highlights" tour for each interest level. Each set of highlights would
present items determined to be of interest at the appropriate level.

Demographic breakdowns by the age of the visitor
does not appear to be adequate - as age isn't necessarily an indicator
of level of interest. Level of interest could translate roughly into age
if need be, but documents would be identified as fitting into one of the
three levels of interest, that is, basic curiosity, informed interest
and technical interest. The basic curiosity material could include the
"high points" that we would include in one of the system-supplied "tours"
that would be in addition to user-selected searches.

Some mechanism would need to be developed to allow
users at any level to have the opportunity to see more than is initially
presented to them, by either searching the information base directly or
changing their stated level of interest.

Challenges And Compromises

Largely due to maintenance considerations, the Museum
prefers not to use keyboards as input devices in the majority of its computer-based
exhibits, using instead trackballs to point to menu choices. This limited
form of user query may not be adequate as a mechanism to select search
strategies that take advantage of the textual richness of the archival
documents included in the SWE. It may be that two different user query
approaches will have to be developed -- one for the onsite user and one
for the offsite or Web-based user. Users of the non-keyboard interface
may lose subject access to much of the material unless some other sort
of navigational tools is developed.

Members of the museum's education and exhibition
staff are concerned that all newly developed exhibits appeal at some level
to children. This will affect the identification of material and may necessitate
the construction of a "just-for-kids" mode, possibly with a separate user
interface.

The extent to which specimen-level data will be
provided is still undecided, as there is a long tradition of limiting
access to particular types of data, such as specific location information.
This type of sensitive information may simply be omitted from the public
display at all levels.

Other Aspects Of The Propsed Smart Web Exhibit

Not discussed in this paper are the plans for the evaluation
of the user interface, the tools used to index and provide access to media
other than text or still images or the process for obtaining reproduction
rights to material under copyright. Links may be provided to other similar
resources outside the individual museum or library.

Conclusion

The Smart Web Exhibit project is still in the specification
and development phase. The challenge of providing information to a diverse
audience online, on target and on time, will be met in the coming year.

Appendix: Document Types In The Museum's Archival
Collection

The proposed document types are based on past user queries.
Terms listed under each standard category are examples of documents that
might be encountered in the collection that would be included under the
standard category.

Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1994). The past, the present
and the future: museum education from the 1790s to the 1990s. In E. Hooper-Greenhill,
ed. The educational role of the museum (pp. 258-262). London: Routledge.